Dreaming of a future in which music, instead of just being rendered audio files, arrives in fully generative, interactive form? Albums might “listen” to the world around you, and listeners could record their own alternate versions of music and share with others.

RjDj, the generative mobile music platform for Apple devices, realizes that future right now, instead of at some nebulous time in the future. In addition to the iPhone, you can make use of a second-generation iPod to use it. (You’ll need a headset with a mic; I have one by Griffin I’m testing.) And the RjDj folks have a whole bevy of significant updates to share:

• Free downloads (limited time): All three RjDj releases are available now for free. That includes the RjDj app itself (from which you can now grab and share releases), as well as RjDj Album (with a selection of generative/interactive/reactive releases) and the new RjDj shake.
• Download “scenes”: From the beginning, we knew that RjDj was imagined as a platform for other people to release interactive music. Now you can download scenes for free or fee. (Paid scenes currently redirect to the browser, but with iPhone SDK 3.0, you’ll be able to buy right from the app.)
• Share recordings: Because RjDj-generated music is controlled by the user and often records from the environment, the music may sound different each time. You can now share recordings with others from the device and the new social site.
• RjDj.me community: The RjDj folks have built a little community where you can share your favorite scenes and upload recordings, and keep track of scenes coming out from other artists.

As an addendum to the last story, Ivica Ico Bukvic sends along an example of the [myu] Max/MSP + Unity game engine combination in action. Here’s the surprise: Unity isn’t generating visuals. Instead, Unity simulates ripples created by movement in the space, and builds physical models that are sonified and spatialized by Max/MSP.

Speaking of work involving art museums and the combination of Max and Unity, VJ Anomolee notes in comments his own work with the pairing. Lightbent Synth is an in-progress piece with alternative controllers and sensors that produces sound with a novel visual representation (sound’s very quiet in this preview — more hopefully once it progresses):

Lightbent Synth from VJ Anomolee on Vimeo.

Ivica explains the top work:

Sequencers by definition traditionally lock musical patterns into repetitive, unchanging blocks of time. But a new generation of generative sequencers can instead form organic patterns that change and transform.

Nodal is a totally free-as-in-beer (closed-source) sequencer for composing music. (A license is needed for commercial use.) As the name implies, it uses a matrix of nodes to represent musical structure. The best way to understand what that means exactly is to check out the examples and give the app a shot, but is good fun – and capable of creating some lovely, unusual musical textures.

The good news now is that if you’re on Windows XP/Vista, you’re no longer left out of the fun: the app now runs Universal on Mac and on Windows, as well.

Aside from Windows support, also new in version 1.1:

• New, more polished UI
• Keyboard shortcuts
• Internal MIDI synth support on Windows

It does sound as though Nodal may not remain free-as-in-beer, but with some significant updates coming later this year will move into the cheap-as-in-beer territory. Stay tuned.

Composer and co-developer Peter Mcilwain sends along the video here with a live improvisation made in the software. It’s a bit Minimalist-influenced, but shows how you can use Nodal to drive some musical inspiration. Peter also explains just what Nodal means musically to him and the small but growing collection of users taking advantage of Nodal’s paradigm:

Fractals, those wacky self-similar, rough geometries that resemble so many patterns in nature, were once all the rage. Ravers and digital artists embraced them, only to get bored with them, apparently. To billions of years of evolution and natural phenomena, they’re still cool. And to me, there’s still plenty to talk about when it comes to thinking how fractals might be all the rage.

Composer Terran Olson, a musician with a long resume that includes work with the Ives Quartet and Quartet San Francisco, takes on the idea of fractals in a new article. Writing for our friends at Rain Pro – makers of music and visual pro PC laptops – Terran explores how fractal patterns could be applied to sound.

Exploring Audio Fractals

The results are fascinating: they’re a kind of fractal synthesis. Of course, that gets at the heart of the question: just how do you map a visual pattern like a fractal – or anything else visual – to music? The answers aren’t always intuitive. The biggest question is whether to work at the scale of sound (Terran focuses on individual samples and impulses), or to deal with musical patterns. I knew I had read a fractal article in Electronic Musician; sure enough, in 1999 EM did a story on fractals that focused instead on pitch mappings. (Bonus: Bach even comes up.)

Fractals and Music

Composer Gustavo Diaz-Jerez penned that story, and the results tend toward algorithmic music. Many of the tools are now gone, though some survive (Csound) and other tools (Max/MSP, Pd, SuperCollider, Reaktor, ChucK) could certainly fill in.

And, of course, for a truly high-level musical approach to fractals, skip the individual sounds or individual notes and write a whole song, like Jonathan Coulton’s brilliant fractal ode, “Mandelbrot Set.” (It should also help anyone needing to, erm, brush up on their fractal theory.)

Sadly, neither of these articles is especially useful as how-to – great on theory, but not so practical if you haven’t tried these things before. That begs for a new tutorial. Are you working with fractals these days? I’d love to hear what you’re doing.

I’ve been talking to folks about sonifying or music-i-fying data a lot lately; I even created a soothing, gamelan-like melody from my Gmail spam folder at South by Southwest last spring. But this particular example is, well … special.

I hesitate to share this, because a) YouTube numbers suggest you may have seen it already and b) it’s pretty depressing. On the other hand, it’s not like the fact the economy is depressing is news, exactly, so I suggest we employ the time-tested coping method that is laughter. Thanks (?) to Paul Norheim for this.

It also suggests a pleasing solution: the world economy just has the pitch control set wrong! Just start that turntable up again.

Or, more disturbingly, the fall of the economy is all part of some deep Schenkerian urlinie, a global capitalistic descent to the tonic. (What? No one up for some Friday afternoon theory humor?)

And yes, with apologies to the very-talented Microsoft Songsmith team, your product is becoming the new Hitler meme.

That’s it. We’re out for the weekend. I got nothin’.